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Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
The Cape Wolf Sessions
These are exciting times. When making plans for our third album, we decided to ditch the normal route of going to studio, laying down basic tracks, doing massive overdubs, analyzing the material on a computer, correcting the inevitable mistakes with various processors and so on.
Instead we packed our gear in a van and headed for Kuisma's spacious loghouse at Susiniemi. That's Cape Wolf in English. How cool is that?
We took along some great microphones and preamps and a top-notch recording console. Drums and tinwhistle were set up in makeshift booths in the main parlour. Matti's guitar amps (Vox AC30 and Fender Reverbsomething) were put in the kitchen as the noise they make is earshattering. Matti says those all-tube amps need to be cranked up real loud in order to sound right. Who am I to argue?
After a relaxing sauna session and a case of beer we just pushed the big red button and started playing. If a take was not what we wanted, we erased it and played again. Perhaps bass and bass drum did not align perfectly all the time, but the feeling conveyed by those recordings was wonderful. No more sterile studios for us ever again.
Each day we worked well into the night. When the eastern sky began to glow with the morning light, we sat on the porch with another case of beer and marveled at the sounds of birds in the woods and over the lake. We took a sensitive condenser microphone outside and recorded some of that racket in order to include it in one of the songs. I'm no expert in bird calls, but I was told we heard oral performances by storks, swans, geese, cuckoos, pheasants, owls, blackbirds and various small critters that to my ear sounded all alike.
We have a song called The Perfect Traveller (music by Hannu, lyrics by Ilkka) that will really benefit from a shot of tranquility provided by those birds. We shall conclude the recordings in the near future with backing vocals and some banjo, mandolin and accordeon parts. After that we'll send the tracks to a professional recording engineer for mixing and mastering. New Rats material should be ready for distribution sometime during the summer. We'll keep you posted.
Meanwhile, take it easy.
Greetings from the Rat Pack.
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| Posted By Redhill Rats @ 6:50 AM |
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